Backlash
by Poorfox
Summary: The war of man against beast is long over. Nobody one. Somebody survived. I survived - and I'm going back. This time, I'm the one with the unnatural advantage. My name is Connor Temple. Join me as I dive into the abyss.


The beasts are everywhere; they grasp onto the walls with vicious claws, and lurk on the rooftops in menacing poses. Teeth are bared, and saliva drips from their needle-like fangs in anticipation of the coming meal - me.

I don't feel particularly hungry, but then again, perhaps I'm missing the point. I couldn't care less. They slink closer, crawling down the walls and leaping to the ground. Some drop to all fours, and rush at me – others rear up onto their hind legs and thrust fangs in the air.

The first few times that this happened, I was terrified. The next few, I was fmerely worried. If anything, I was beginning to find them irritating now. Grey skin stretched – I could see the muscles flexing beneath the surface. If they had eyes, I'd be able to boast that I could see them gleaming with menace. Since they didn't, all I could say is that I felt the rush of wind in my hair, telling me when to duck.

I duck. A clawed limb ruffles my hair; ugly evil-alien-demon-monster-creatures can be better than a comb, sometimes. Maybe I'm getting complacent, but what the hell. Getting almost scalped by one of these beasts is nothing compared to having it tear you apart, and I've lived my life on the wavering knife-edge of 'almost' for so long that these little meet-and-eat events are like daytime television.

Oops – there's more than one. I spin and lash out with a foot, knocking the first beast away. Lucky me; it lands on another one, and they start playing with one another – or ripping one another to shreds – whatever you want to call it.

Three more approach; any unfortunate human caught in this position would be dead. I'm not sure if I still qualify. This is my life.

They rush at me headlong, and I duck again. I'm not fortunate enough for them to collide, but a hand thrust out deals with one of them. My fingers are outstretched like their claws, and I dig them into the beast's flesh. It's tough, like dried beef jerky, but with a fouler taste. Not tough enough – I rip its heart straight out, and toss it to the third. These things will eat anything, even their own. I'm in no danger from it if it's not hungry; I'm not tasty enough for it to fight the others for.

One left. I jump, higher than an Olympic athlete would believe, back in the days when we still had the Olympics. With a twitch of my legs, my feet slam together, pointing downwards, into a, well, point. My body isn't exactly sharp enough to slice it in two, but with enough force behind me, I make a damn good chisel.

If the beasts felt compassion they would wince at the sound it made. If they felt fear they would wince at the expression on my face. I'm not a cackling psychopath, or a screaming demon. No, my expression isn't scary. I look bored. When surrounded by the corpses of fallen enemies, that's fucking terrifying.

At least, I would have thought so, fifteen years ago, before the world ended.

I look around, and wonder what to do next. Several dozen of the beasts surround me, keeping a wary distance. I know what's going to happen. They're all going to rush me together, and do their best to score some fresh meat. I've heard that humans taste a lot like pork.

They rush. I grin for the first time in weeks. This will be more interesting than the everyday tussles.

I'm not worried. Why should I be?

My name is Connor, and war is my Temple.

Not that this is war. It's just chaos, and death, and blood.

I raise my arms and tense the muscles in my legs. Chaos begins.

Minutes later, I jog around a corner, blood soaking through the fibres of my drab clothing. The stains never get out – just another one of the casualties of war. I miss hot showers, too – not that it mattered any more. Everything stank of blood, and death, and sweat. Still, I'm one of the lucky ones, trapped in the wilderness of after-mageddon. I'm a survivor, and a fighter. That's all life has been; fighting, running, surviving, and hiding. Everyone hides at first. A little while later, many wander out and meet the beasts on their own ground. These people die. Always.

I didn't.

Technology has always advanced rapidly in times of war – that's what I was taught at school. There hasn't been much of a chance for anything to develop since the beasts came; we had no access to materials, or machinery. A few things crept through, however, and I'm the result.

Back when they first appeared, we called the beasts predators – a future evolution of the bat that was so powerful, so stealthy, and so terrifying that it made a perfect killing machine. Now they're just beasts. There are humans and beasts – less than a dozen humans, and more than a hundred thousand beasts.

We tried guns, at first – that failed. Later, we tried to use sound as a weapon against their hyper-sensitive hearing. They adapted. We tried cudgels and blades like warriors from a bygone era; nothing worked. The beasts were too strong, and too fast, and too deadly.

I can remember all the science-fiction films I used to love; gamma rays and gene-splicing giving superpowers, and bravado. I'm no superhero. I'm a fighter; I'm the best fighter that has ever been, or ever can be. I wasn't trained, or enhanced, or mutated. I _evolved._

Anomalies in space and time popped up all over the place until we figured out how to close them. I hardly understand the details; time-travel was confusing. The anomalies are, after all, not physical objects. They don't work in the same way as anything else does, or can, so it's no surprise when something totally unexpected happens.

Is this confusing? You bet – I was freaked out at first, but later on it became second nature. I was the expert. I thought I knew everything there was to know about the anomalies, and then something totally new happened.

I saw an anomaly close on a raptor's head– it got severed in two. I've seen anomalies open on someone – they got sucked in. Thing is, I was nowhere near ready for one to open on me. No, not _on_ me; _in_ me. For a moment, I and the anomaly were one. They aren't sentient, but I am, and it was a part of me. I was fleeing from a pack of beasts at the time. All I wanted was to be able to fight back, to meet them on their terms. I reached out and sought the strength from my aching muscles. There was none there. My tired mind could think of no way to escape, and my eyes were closing despite my efforts.

So, naturally, when I suddenly found myself with an ethereal four-dimensional limb, I pulled the strength I could from that, not knowing what I was doing, or what would happen.

_Time_ happened.

Millions of years passed – or maybe more – in a fraction of a second. It was as if I had somehow evolved through a hundred thousand generations, retaining my humanity, and perfecting it for battle. My body flickered, condensed, and changed. Every external detail remained unchanged; I was the same person, but better.

I was stronger. I was faster.

For the first time in my life, I was strong enough and fast enough.

That was when I started to fight back. I haven't stopped since.

I pass another corner, and have to step to one side to avoid treading on a cadaver that lies in my path. There are a few bites from the corpse – I can't recognize who it is – but the beast that did this must have had its meal interrupted. That's good, very good.

It means that Lester's here.

High-pitched sounds were the bane of these creatures, with their hyper-sensitive hearing. Loud blasts wouldn't hurt them – hadn't for a while – but the right pitch would keep them away like a dog whistle for _really_ mean hounds. Lester has a tiny little speaker embedded in his arm to do just that. It's how he managed to survive as long as I did – believe it or not, he's actually older than me.

I find him quickly, in the cellar of a nearby building. Cellars make good places to hide for a few days, until the beasts find you.

"Connor," he says. "You're late."

I resent that. Really, really resent that. Years of surviving in hell, side by side, and he still treats me like the geeky student working under him in the Arc. If it irritated me before, it was now like a rusty nail in my – ah, who am I kidding? I love the guy, and I'm pretty sure he feels the same way. Not like _that_! He's the older brother I didn't ever have – or perhaps a distant cousin.

We're the only ones left – Lester, a ragtag group of men and women we'd found four years ago, miraculously still alive, and the resident mercenary. That last one's me, by the way. Lester refuses to believe that I'm anything but a mercenary. Money is useless now that there's nothing to buy and nobody to sell, but he assures me that if that wasn't the case I'd be wrestling dinosaurs for loose change.

Yeah, I can punch out a tyrannosaur. Pretty cool, yeah? I still wish I could fly, though, but this is no comic book. This is life, and this is hell, and this is death.

Speaking of death, that ragtag group of men and women seems to be a fair bit smaller. I'm sure that there were more than two of them.

I open my mouth, about to ask, and Lester nods, his face set grimly. Well, more grim than usual.

Oh, right. Corpses outside. Gotcha.

"It's not too late, you know," I say. Lester's eyes narrow. He knows what I'm talking about. "This doesn't have to have happened."

"The anomalies are all gone. We closed them all, permanently."

He's lying. We both know that. It would be easy to open a new one – if we had access to a phenomenally powerful source of energy. During the time that we were playing with those gleaming gateways to the past – and future – we would close and, later, open them without wondering how something so powerful could be done so easily.

Turned out that it wasn't easy – life's funny like that. There is only one force strong enough to rip time itself apart, and that is the raw energy of life itself. The anomalies began to appear with no warning, a result of the unused life saturating the landscape of the future – now the present – seeping backwards in time. When all those billions of people died, the energy had nowhere to go. Ever seen what happens when you fill a balloon with too much air? That's right – time itself popped, and things started coming through the holes.

Things like the beasts.

The dinosaurs were impressive, but the beasts were demons of the future coming back to kill. Give me a raptor instead any day. They're friendlier.

"They're not all gone. There's one left."

Lester turns the full force of his I'm-going-to-fire-your-ass glare onto me – ouch.

"You can't change the past, Connor. We've tried!"

I shake my head. He's wrong, although he never believed me or my faith in Nick's wildest tale.

"It's already changed once. It can do again."

He sighs, and looks around, and looks at the others – the last living people on this planet – for their opinion. They huddle together mutely. I haven't heard them speak since we found them. Neither has Lester. The horrors that they've witnessed must have rendered them speechless, literally. I've seen worse.

Lester gives up – a simple nod or head-shake is too much to ask. He knows that he can't talk me out of it with reason, but his eyes dart about, seeking any opportunity. He doesn't want to risk losing me. I'm touched, but my mind is set.

"There's nowhere for you to draw the energy from, and even if there was, you'd probably end up killing yourself. No, you should just stay here and make the most of what time you have left."

I don't want to leave him behind, certainly not if he tries to stop me going, but I can't exactly choose otherwise.

I can hear the unspoken plea of _don't leave me_ hidden behind his flimsy words. With every beast's life that I've taken, the life energy no longer being used was absorbed by me – by the part of me that contained a dormant anomaly. All this time, I'd been recharging one hell of a battery. Lester knew – he's the one that came up with the theory. He'd have been brilliant if he'd gone into a real career instead of becoming a government lackey. Did I mention that he used to be my boss?

The battery was full.

I don't want to leave Lester alone, in this terrible place. I don't have much of a choice – if things work out, it'll be as if it had never happened.

He knew. He nods, and a weight lifts off my chest. I didn't want the burden of abandoning him on top of the knowledge of what's to come.

"You understand how this will work, don't you?" he asks. I don't, but I say yes anyway, and he continues speaking. "From what we understand, the anomaly isn't located anywhere in your physical body, but in another aspect that exists on another plane."

"You mean in my soul," I interject, helpful as always. Lester snorts in derision; he isn't swayed by fancy names or spirituality. His pragmatism was one of the few things I'd been able to rely on.

"If you want. In any case, you're not going to step through into another time like we do with normal anomalies. My best guesses – and your best calculations – all say that you'll land right in the body of your former self."

There is one thing that's been worrying me, although I haven't discussed it before; didn't want to give him the idea that I was planning to go back.

"Does this mean that I'm going to be killing the old me?" I ask. Lester nods, and I let out a long breath.

"That's good. Having two Connor Temples in one time could be...troublesome."

"That's an understatement," says Lester. He still hasn't forgiven me for wreaking havoc in the Arc on a regular basis. Perhaps I should be nicer to him this time around.

I have no fear of jumping straight out of existence when I steal my former body. When you've seen what I have, you won't be afraid of a little thing like temporal instability or existential dysfunction.

We talk for a little while longer, but I'm getting restless, and our goodbyes don't take half so long as they should. Lester hands me a prized relic from days when we still had hope, a device for opening anomalies. He doesn't bother with posturing – he rams the crystal surface of it right into my chest. I wince in pain I don't feel a moment too late. Better get used to playing normal.

"Remember, this will lead you through pivotal moments in your life. Focus, and you should be able to choose which one to drop off at."

"See you in the past, Lester."

He gives me a faint smile – genuine, and rare. I wonder briefly if I'll be able to befriend him sooner. It shouldn't be too hard; despite all appearances, he's a person who craves affection, and adores companionship. Working at the Arc was a huge burden on him, as he'd had to spend five days a week away from his wife and children.

"Be careful," he says. "There are dangers in the past that aren't here any more."

I scoff. What could hurt _me_? Lester hears, and his smile turns back to his usual smirk – the one that says _I've thought of something you haven't_.

"You'll handle the dinosaurs fine, I'm sure. It's Abby that will get you."

A lump is caught in my throat, and I can't say anything. He raises one hand in mock salute, and slams the other down onto the device. Everything goes white, but I hardly notice. I'm far too wrapped up in one thought.

_Abby._

Abby Maitland – the one true love of my life. I don't remember what she looks like, not really. I recall her eyes, and her short white-blonde hair. I remember the lilting tones of her laughter and the curve of her lips when she smiled.

The white light flickers around me, bearing down with inescapable pressure.

She died too long ago. It wasn't my fault, but _it_ _was my fault_. I would have died for her – no question, no time to consider it, or choose the moral choice. For the others on the team, I'd have needed to make the decision, although it would have been the same. With Abby, there was no decision; dying for her was the only option I ever had.

I didn't die for her.

The lights blur into greys and browns.

There were three rules of the hellscape I dubbed after-mageddon;

The beasts never give up. Ever.

I love Abby Maitland.

Everything stinks of blood.

I love Abby Maitland.

Grey and brown light forms into rocks – I see myself lying on top of one – a boulder so high it's almost a cliff. The ocean crashes against rock at the base of the cliffs. I remember this moment.

Abby dangles below my – the other my – hand. There are tears in her eyes. She cries out, desperately, pleading with the other me to let go.

"I can't!" I – he – says. A trickle of tears wind their way down her cheek, and I watch myself slip forwards, almost falling. My throat was hoarse then, I remember. It took a lot of effort to breathe, let alone speak, and yet there was something I had to say that was too important to wait.

I told her that I loved her.

Pivotal moments indeed, Lester. I tip an unseen hat to my invisible companion, wherever he is now, and concentrate. This isn't the time I need. My focus wavers; I can't stop staring at Abby. I drink in the sight of her, and then growl in frustration. There will be time for that later!

I turn my back on her. My focus redoubles. Everything fades to white.

Things need to change – there's only one case of time being changed that I know of. I focus on what I know of that, and will it to work.

The lights begin changing again, this time closer to green than grey.

It's working!

The original team is standing in a clearing, deep within the forest of Dean. An anomaly is in the middle of a ring of crude lights that have been erected. Someone's missing – Cutter. He'll be through any time now. I've missed the old guy.

My eyes stray towards Abby. She looks amazing – she always has done, to me. I savour the sight of her; she's water in a desert. Sweet, delicious water, with maybe a hint of cherry to it. I drift closer, and brush fingertips that I don't technically have across her cheek. She stiffens – I jerk back, surprised. Could she feel me?

There's a commotion across the clearing. A quick glance tells me that Cutter's here, but I have eyes onlfy for Abby. Reluctantly, I shake myself out of my reverie, telling myself that there'll be time to stare later. It's always later, and later, until it's too late. Not this time – I'm not going to make the same mistakes that I did last time.

I look around, and quickly find the other me. With a mental push, I get closer, and closer, until suddenly we touch. He stiffens like Abby did, only more so, and collapses. I have time to ask myself _what the hell?_ before the white light flashes brightly.

When my vision clears, I'm looking up from where I lie, sprawled on the ground. I look up, standing on unsteady feet in time to meet Cutter's gaze. His eyes are darting around, wild and panicked. Mine probably aren't much better. For a second our eyes lock, and he utters a phrase that, though I didn't realize it until years later, was of such importance that it should be carved into his very grave.

"Where's Claudia Brown?"


End file.
